Larry Page

Computer Scientist / Business Personality

Born: 26 March 1973

Birthplace: Lansing, Michigan

Best known as: The co-founder of Google

Name at birth: Lawrence Edward Page

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the creators of the search engine Google. Larry Page's father was a professor of computer science at Michigan State, and Larry studied computing at the University of Michigan. Larry Page earned his B.S.E. in 1995 and then moved on to graduate school at Stanford University. There he began to create and analyze his own catalogue of Internet links and was joined by Brin, a fellow Stanford grad student he met in 1995. Together they wrote the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" and created their own search engine, at first known as BackRub and then in 1998 officially incorporated as Google. It was soon enormously popular. Google became a public company in 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires at age 27. The company brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2001, and he ran the company in a triumvirate with Page and Brin for the next successful decade as Google became the most-used search engine on the planet. During those years, Larry Page had the title of co-founder and president of products. Google announced in 2011 that Larry Page was taking over as CEO of Google, with Schmidt becoming executive chairman.

Extra credit:

Google is a play on the mathematical term googol -- a one followed by 100 zeroes... Larry Page married Lucy Southworth in December 2007; Southworth studied biomedical informatics as a doctoral candidate at Stanford.